How to reduce a period up to completion is important in a design process of a product such as an automobile from the viewpoint of costs and profits. For the purpose of reducing working hours of an engineer, a technique of automatically determining the best design or automatically calculating an optimized value of target parameters has been proposed. Various optimization methods have been proposed. A technique of automatically optimizing a target parameter value in a design process, a technique of optimizing a layout of a wall panel, a technique of optimizing parameters of a circuit in a circuit design are all examples that have been disclosed.
However, it is very complicated to design an automobile and its parts, so there has not yet been proposed a technique of automatically designing these with a computer. Further, the design of a large-scale product such as an automobile requires a large number of processes. Moreover, these processes depend on each other in some cases. Thus, it is very difficult to determine which process is performed first. For example, if certain two processes depend on each other, a result of an already performed process has to be modified to be consistent with a result of a process performed later irrespective of a performing order of these processes, in some cases. The required time for the modification varies depending on a performing order of the processes. Hence, unless a performing order of processes is appropriately determined, the sum of the times required for the modification would considerably increase, leading to reduction in the whole efficiency for the design.
Techniques of appropriately determining a working procedure are given as references. These techniques could be applied to a performing order of the design processes of the automobile. However, if the technique of Non-Patent Document 1 is applied to the automobile, calculation for determining a performing order cannot be completed within a practical period due to too many processes. In addition, the techniques to determine the best performing order, so the performing order might leave room for improvement.
Accordingly, it is an object of the present invention to provide a system, a method, and a program product, which can overcome the above problems. The object can be attained by combining features specified in independent claims in the scope of claims. In addition, dependent claims specify more advantageous examples of the present invention.